"The mannequins are here again. I can feel them throbbing in my ears. They’re standing around in the kitchen, impassive as stone. But inside they’re laughing. I’m not getting out of bed for them, not this time."

In the Dark Room is a surreal novella written and illustrated by James Knight, author of Head Traumas. The story is narrated by a bedridden man who finds himself besieged by memories, fantasies and the mannequins at the bottom of the stairs. Knight's combination of words and pictures invites us into a strange yet familiar world, governed by the logic of a dream.

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Covering such subjects as: mannequins, memory, seagulls, time, bicycles cat killing machines, and fully illustrated by images captured from dreams (oneirographs), James Knight has produced a thrilling surreal and challenging glimpse into the mind of a bed ridden twin, although we cannot be really sure he is either bedridden or a twin such is the disorientation we feel from the written words and bizarre images. Very like his previous excellent collection of prose "Head Traumas" ,the writing is succinct and precise, and in few words he is able to evoke a dark unsettling and yet ever so slightly comic universe, but unlike "Head Traumas" the writing follows a common character/theme and is all the better for it.As much as it is nice to support independent publishers, the kindle version reproduces the oneirographs in full colour as opposed to black and white, so bear this in mind when deciding which version to go for.I look forward to James Knights' next published work

Let me at least try and describe the basics of In the Dark Room for you. The narration takes place from the point of view of a bed-ridden man, whose monologue makes up the prose within the book, each thought on its own page and separated from the next by some of James' trademark spectacular "oneirograph" dream-photo compositions - clashing colours, overlapping shapes and highly disrupting imagery doing to your eyes what the surreal stream of consciousness in the words does to your brain.

Or at least that's how I read it, you may read it differently. If you can just imagine a man lying in a room talking to himself, or a nurse or carer as they work, passing comment on things that are happening and the thoughts that come into his head, telling stories, that is what this is. The mannequins, an invention of James' that first surfaced on his Twitter account @badbadpoet are very much centre stage this time as protagonists, or antagonists, although The Bird King, James' most famous, or infamous, character to date does get an oblique mention on occasion. There are seagulls having arguments, a forest in the stripes on the bedroom wallpaper and shop mannequins in the kitchen making toast. And it is all told so matter of factly that it all makes perfect sense.

I am a huge fan of James' surreal ideas, both in his written work and his art. This book is very different to Head Traumas but don't get me wrong that isn't a bad thing, not a bad thing at all. The thing I really like about this book is that each page flows to the next with consummate ease making it much more of a complete work, rather than a dip into poetry book like Head Traumas was. These are not disparate works in a compilation, this is an intermingling of recurrent themes building a complex whole that becomes so much more than the sum of its parts. Each story/poem/thought/stream of consciousness/whatever you want to call it is self contained and makes perfect sense as such but the train of thought between story and image and story flows so beautifully that it is criminal to pick just one.

As with all of James' work, not everyone will understand or even appreciate it, but this is the same for all works of genius. And I realise that this review doesn't make much sense because trying to describe genius adequately is far more difficult than being one. Just buy the book instead.